Quoting Peter Arremann <loony@xxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> If you need any kind of performance and reliability, stay away from those
> though. First, a E4500 with 8CPUs running Solaris compiles the tree for one
> of the products we work with in about an hour and a half. A single P4 3.2Ghz
> running Linux takes about 12 minutes.
Not defending Sun, just to put things into perspective for folks not familiar
with Sun hardware (since Peter forgot to mention couple of facts).
E4500 is discontinued for some time now. It is rather old machine, much older
that the above mentioned P4. I doubt that Peter's intention was to compare
speed of Sun's server in general with the speed of latest-and-greates P4
systems. I hope that he simply forgot to mention how much older that E4500 is
than the P4 box.
The processors in that thing are 400MHz or slower (not sure if 450MHz
was option
for E4500). Plus they are UltraSPARC-II (which is an older Sun's CPU
design). So yeah, you can buy them cheap on ebay. Just as well as you
can buy P-II and
P-III systems even cheaper. And you could probably get VAX 11/780 for
free (as
long as you promise to take good care of it). People that buy E4500
nowdays are
either buying them for spare parts, or they simply want redundant box exactly
the same as the old box they already have. Or people that simply need some
Sparc hardware around, but don't want to spend money on current line of Sun's
servers and don't care if the system is slow as long as it does the job (my
guess is Peter's company falls into this category, from what he wrote,
otherwise they would be running their Sparc builds on something more recent).
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